With development of virtualization technologies, requirements for hardware resources such as memory resources are increasingly high. For a conventional dynamic random access memory (DRAM), energy consumption is high and capacity expansion is difficult. A new-type memory with low energy consumption, a large capacity, and non-volatility, such as a phase change memory (PCM), may be expected to replace the conventional DRAM memory.
As a new generation non-volatile memory, a PCM uses reversible phase change of a material to store information to achieve single-level cell (SLC) storage and multi-level cell (MLC) storage. An SLC features high costs, a small capacity, and a high speed, while an MLC features a large capacity, low costs, and a low speed.
Based on different features of the SLC and the MLC, if SLC storage is used, relatively high access performance may be obtained but a storage capacity may be restricted, and if MLC storage is used, a relatively large storage capacity may be obtained but access performance may be relatively low. If a manner in which the SLC and the MLC are both set in memory is used, the SLC and the MLC may be set according to a preset proportion just in accordance with requirements of access performance and a storage capacity, but relatively optimal access performance and a relatively large storage capacity cannot be obtained. That is, there is still no effective solution that takes into account advantages of both the SLC and the MLC.